I will be giving a talk on my favourite artist, the engraver Thomas Bewick, at the CAG on Saturday afternoon at 3.

The Outfit dir. John Flynn (1975)

some dogs from the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration: Home

How To Peel Garlic in Less Than Ten Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

Gram Parsons at Joshua Tree National Park

GreenCine Daily: RETRO ACTIVE: The Killer Elite (1975)

The Killer Elite (Sam Peckinpah 1975)

the drawings of LEWIS CARROLL

“Let me think, was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that’s a great puzzle!”

Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or "cubist" visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor. Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface. Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. Other words constantly shift or invert themselves without ending, these could be called "suspended words." Simple statements are often based on language fears, and sometimes result in dogma or a non-sense. Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. References are often reversed so that the "object" takes the place of the "word". A is A is never A is A, but rather X is A. The misunderstood notion of a metaphor has it that A is X - that is wrong. The scale of a letter in a word changes one's visual meaning of the word. Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. A word outside of the mind is a set of "dead letters". The mania for literalness relates to the breakdown in the rational belief in reality. Books entomb words in a synthetic rigor mortis, perhaps that is why "print" is thought to have entered obsolescence. The mind of this death, however, is unrelentingly awake.

Eton Corrasable

[My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas - i.e., "printed matter". R.S.June 2, 1972]

rare footage of the late Jo Ann Kelly, Britain's finest blues singer

Nonsense poetry by Christian Morgenstern

At the Housefly Planet

Upon the housefly planet
the fate of the human is grim:
for what he does here to the housefly,
the fly does there unto him.

To paper with honey cover
the humans there adhere,
while others are doomed to hover
near death in vapid beer.

However, one practice of humans
the flies will not undertake:
they will not bake us in muffins
nor swallow us by mistake.

100 years of the Loeb Classical Library

There are now 518 volumes in the Loeb Classical Library -- just enough to make the idea of owning and reading them all seem an attainable challenge. The earliest authors in the Loeb catalog, Homer and Hesiod, wrote in the 7th century BCE; the latest, the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, wrote in the 7th century CE. Here, then, is 1,400 years of human culture, all the texts that survive from one of the greatest civilizations human beings have ever built -- and it can all fit in a bookcase or two. To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy, accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship -- and one of the most democratic...

A Time Capsule of 1940s Downtown Los Angeles - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Video - The Atlantic